Snapshot - Definition and Overview

The snapshot is a concept in photography introduced by Eastman Kodak with their Brownie box camera in 1900: A casual photograph taken without any particular pre-arrangement, often of every day events.

The snapshot also plays a role as concept of artistic photography, see lomography.

In the distributed computing field, a snapshot is process of recording the global state of the system, see snapshot algorithm.

In software development, a snapshot is the way the source code looked on a given day in its history of development. This is useful when trying to hunt down a recently exposed bug. The developer may go back to earlier snapshots of the code to see just when the bug was introduced. This narrows the amount of code he must examine in order to locate the bug. This use of the word appears mostly on CVS websites doing collaborative software development, particularly in the free software world.

In a general sense, snapshot has taken on the meaning of a glimpse of something.

Originally a "snap shot" was a shooting term, meaning a shot aimed and fired very quickly at a target that appears suddenly and for a very short period of time.